Currier: Sleepers and Dreamers world premiere

(June 2012)

New work for chorus and orchestra continues the composer’s exploration of science through music

The mysterious world of sleep is examined in Sebastian Currier’s Sleepers and Dreamers. This new work for chorus and orchestra will be premiered July 6–7, 2012, at Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival by conductor Carlos Kalmar, commissioned in celebration of the Grant Park Chorus’s 50th anniversary.

Currier has long had a curiosity to explore science through his pieces of music. This is evident in his most recent violin concerto Time Machines, in which varying elements of sound were delicately and masterfully presented. Says the composer of his new work: "Sleepers and Dreamers takes us on a voyage from the normal world into the distant, inaccessible world of our sleeping selves…it imagines this remote world within us." The 22-minute work is performed in two parts. The first part, titled Sleepers, features text specifically written for this work by American poet Sarah Manguso, where sleep is "observed, considered and analyzed," according to Currier. The second part, Dreamers, presents the deeper consciousness of sleep, where dreams enter the picture. This section presents actual dream accounts from different dreamers, reflecting, as the composer notes, "the desires, fears, anxieties, pleasures in all of us."

A recording of Time Machines, premiered at the New York Philharmonic in June 2011 featuring Anne-Sophie Mutter, was released by Deutsche Grammophon last year. Next up for Currier is the work Deep-Sky Objects, a song cycle for soprano, ensemble and electronics, to be premiered in September 2012 by the Musiqa Ensemble and soprano Karol Bennett.

> For more information on Sebastian Currier, click here.> To view the score to Sleepers and Dreamers, click here.